The New Era of ‘Goldilocks Marketing’: Real-Time is Right-Time

According to the Goldilocks principle, our distance from the sun, 92,960,000 miles to be exact, is just right for supporting life. Any hotter or any colder and we’re either a charred rock or a snowball.

There’s a science to getting things just right. It’s as real in marketing as it is in astronomy and biology.

Working with actual customers, we’re discovering that if you contact customers at just the right time with just the right content, you can easily and quickly achieve double-digit lift in email re-marketing conversions. We have brought Goldilocks-style ‘just right’ marketing to life. Fueled by big data and advances in visitor-centric, real-time analytics, marketing is faster, more relevant and more personalized than ever before.

Instant, precision-targeted re-marketing to visitors with highly relevant content based on their actual behavior and intent to provide an offer that’s so ‘just right’ it’s irresistible…call it ‘the Goldilocks Webtrends principle’ of marketing.

For several months, we’ve been working with an exclusive selection of top brands to test drive and refine what companies can achieve with their e-commerce initiatives with rich, real-time, visitor-level analytics. Let’s walk through one real-life use case with a top travel brand to see how they are using real-time analytics to re-market to their customers via email faster and better than ever.

‘The Goldilocks Principle of Marketing’ In Practice

Here’s what the best real-time analytics solutions can tell marketers: specific online actions taken by individual visitors – literally as they are happening – across channels. Anything less is simply historical data. Anything less is aggregated. Anything less, in digital marketing today, will be too little information that’s too late to market as rapidly and relevantly as marketers need to.

Currently, Travel Brand (which is what we’ll call our early adopter), can track individual, visitor-level online activity all in real-time. They can see what pages, links and offers an individual visitor is clicking on and what potential travel purchases – airline tickets or hotel reservations – are being put in shopping carts. This real-time customer intelligence yields deep insights into customer intent that can be used toward more relevant, more effective re-marketing.

Travel Brand can see, for example, that Visitor A – we’ll call her Goldilocks – is looking at a trip to San Antonio. Goldilocks initiated an airfare search, clicked on a few specific prices to check out schedules and clicked on a few hotel prices to check these out, too. Maybe she even added some of these items to a shopping cart – a specific flight time with a specific airline to San Antonio on a specific date. But, for whatever reason, Goldilocks didn’t click ‘Purchase’. Yet.

So, what do we know about Goldilocks? She’s probably headed to San Antonio. She will most likely go on or around a certain date. She may prefer the airline that she added to his shopping cart. She might need a hotel and might prefer the ones that she clicked on. Heck, there are other things she might do while in San Antonio – like take a tour of the Alamo. Travel Brand can help her with that, too. But…

…I Feel So Abandoned

Sadly, Goldilocks abandoned her shopping cart. For whatever reason, she didn’t pull the trigger on her purchase. It will be much more difficult to sell her that Alamo tour if she doesn’t go to San Antonio in the first place.

When is the best time to offer her a better deal? Right now! She needs to receive the offer before she shops for a better offer from a competitor, not tomorrow in a mass, batch re-marketing email based on how she fits into a large segment of similar customers.

Most online retailers execute email re-targeting based on broad customer segments and data that is hours, if not days or weeks, old today, resulting in a loss of conversion opportunities. Goldilocks needs a highly personalized, highly relevant email delivered to her seconds after she’s left Travel Brand’s site that contains offers and content based upon her specific site activities and intentions.

Using real-time data to create highly personalized, immediately triggered emails – this is proving a powerful tool for turning shopping cart abandonment into conversions. This is how to (re)-market to just the right person with just the right content at just the right time to get him or her to convert (and ship off to San Antonio). Additionally, with this sort of insight and instant email re-marketing capability, the cross-sell and up-sell opportunities are enormous.

The Goldilocks Email

How much more likely would Goldilocks be to purchase her trip to San Antonio if, the moment she left Travel Brand’s site, she received an email offering a 10% discount on airfare? What about bonus miles for booking on her preferred airline (which Travel Brand might know based on her online behavior or profile)? Perhaps a deep discount on an airfare and hotel package? Or a free tour of the Alamo?? (Gotcha – Alamo tours are actually already free…)

How much more likely are customers to convert when they receive a “Goldilocks email” with just the right, relevant offers at just the right time (real-time)? Simply put: A LOT more likely. Specifically: Up to 50% more likely.

In real-life scenarios similar to the one described above, my company has seen our early adopters achieve over 50% lift in email re-marketing conversions. The best part: as a company, as an industry, and as marketers, we’re just getting started with the technology and techniques that are generating these kinds of results.

So, remember, when you’re thinking about the emerging era of real-time analytics and ‘right time’ marketing, think of ‘the Goldilocks principle of marketing’ and how important – and how possible – it is to get digital marketing just right.

What ‘the Goldilocks Principle of Marketing’ Isn’t…

Historical or aggregate analytics that look at the past not the present

Sending out generalized content and offers based on large customer segments

Re-targeting customers with shopping-cart abandonment emails hours or days later